When EA closed BioWare and canceled the next Mass Effect game, it took away a future many of us had been looking forward to for a long, long time. Think: more squadmates to fall for, more ships that you slowly realize feel like home, more decisions that haunt you years later. Despite Mass Effect’s cancelation, that future still exists, at least in some manner (even outside of any direct results from the ongoing #SaveMassEffect campaign).
We just need to look ever so slightly outside of this franchise to see it. Two games with similar DNA to Mass Effect arrive next spring. There’s also a third very intriguing option, depending on how patient you are, coming from the director behind both Knights of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect trilogy.
Tell the crew we’re taking off. There are galaxies to explore. Where to play: PS5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X Calling Exodus a Mass Effect replacement might be underselling things.
Polygon’s two hours with the game were full of the precise things we love about Commander Shepard’s adventures: cover-based shooting, two squadmates you command through a pause-and-aim ability wheel, dialogue that builds companion affinity and nudges a morality meter, and a ship of your own. It’s even coming from some of the same team members who worked on the original trilogy, including narrative director Drew Karpyshyn. There’s a bigger story here, though.
The lore of Exodus, as the true sci-fi sickos will know, starts with humans fleeing a desiccated Earth for the Centauri cluster, roughly 40,000 light-years away. Thanks to the effects of time dilation, some ships get there earlier than others. Like, a lot earlier — millennia.
Those early arrivals rewrote their own genomes into the Celestials, transhumans who regard ordinary people as servants at best and pests at worst. Evolution took some Celestials to terrifying places: the scariest evolutionary line, the Mara-Yama, can be nine-foot-tall predators with fangs and claws or forms wrapped in exoskeletons (and, according to the tabletop companion guide, their bones and limbs degenerate on long voyages until little remains of them but organs and a head). You play Jun Aslan, a Traveler (a human who braves the effects of time dilation on long-haul journeys) racing a technological virus called the Rot that’s eating away at life support on Lidon, the human stronghold planet.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
